Friday, July 29, 2016

Hillary's Tax Plan Bad News For Bedridden Obama Economy

WASHINGTON -- Hillary Clinton handed Donald Trump the best campaign
issue he could hope for this week, on a silver platter, and he ignored
it.

While Clinton was proposing a huge increase in capital gains
taxes on investors, which would kill jobs and what little is left of the
chronically weak Obama economy, Trump was urging his buddy, Russian
thug Vladimir Putin, to step up his cyber-war on the U.S. to find
Hillary's 30,000 deleted emails.

Worse, Trump didn't respond
negatively when a reporter asked him if he would recognize Putin's
military seizure of Ukraine's Crimean peninsula as Russian territory. Or
whether he would lift U.S. sanctions against Moscow for its act of war
on a sovereign country.

"We'll be looking at that. Yeah, we'll be looking," Trump responded at a news conference Wednesday.

Putin's
military takeover of Crimea in 2014 was the first time since World War
II that a European nation has seized territory from another country in
the region. And he is now said to be looking at the Baltic states as his
next victims.
While Trump was clumsily sidestepping questions
that might offend his pal in the Kremlin, Clinton was calling for
punishing tax hikes that economists said would kill job-creating capital
investment in a stalled economy.

In 2012, Obama effectively
raised capital gains taxes in a legislative deal that pushed the rate to
20 percent -- on profits from the sale of stocks, real estate or other
assets.

Hillary's tax hike plan would push the top capital gains
rate up to 36 percent for people and businesses who hold investments for
a minimum of two years, but less than six years.

She says this would raise taxes just on the rich, while discouraging short-term investments by major investors.

But
in a slowing economy that was barely growing at less than 1 percent,
and now suffers from declining capital investment for new business
start-ups, her plan is the kiss of death.

The history of capital
gains taxes can be summed up in one sentence: Lower tax rates result in
stronger economic growth, more jobs, and more tax revenue that will
reduce the budget deficit.

Hillary should know this better than
anyone, because her husband, President Clinton, signed a Republican
cap-gains tax cut bill in his second term that led to a wave of new
investment in high technology, good paying jobs and stronger GDP growth.

He began his presidency by raising the top two income tax
rates to 36 percent and 39.6 percent, and raised the corporate tax rate
to 35 percent.

But economic growth limped along at no better than
3 percent (something Obama has never achieved), and the American people
saw little or no improvements in the U.S. economy. In the 1994
elections, the GOP gained 54 seats in the House and eight seats in the
Senate.

In 1995, Bill Clinton told a party fundraiser that he had
made a bad mistake. "Probably there are people in this room still mad at
me at that budget because you think I raised your taxes too much. It
might surprise you to know that I think I raised them too much, too," he
said.

So in his second term, he quickly signed the GOP's welfare
reform plan, slashed trade tariffs under the North American Free Trade
Agreement (NAFTA) to boost trade, and sharply cut the capital gains tax
to 20 percent from 28 percent.

The result was a boom in capital
investment, stronger employment growth, 4.2 percent economic growth,
much higher wages, and a sharp rise in worker 401(k) retirement funds as
the stock market soared.

All of this happened, "not by raising
tax rates on high income but not yet rich middle-class families, and
certainly not by raising the capital gains tax ... nor by massively
increasing federal spending," economic analyst Charles Kadlec wrote in
Forbes magazine.

Instead, "it was a prosperity produced by freeing
America's poor from a punitive welfare system, lowering tariffs,
reducing tax rates on the creators of wealth, (and) limiting the growth
of federal expenditures," Kadlec said.

Hillary, who opposed many
of her husband's actions on trade, welfare and tax cuts, is planning to
raise business investment tax rates, oppose all free trade agreements,
and continue Obama's failed spending stimulus policies.

Trump, who
no doubt would sign the tax cut reform bill Republicans would send to
his desk next year, still intends to raise U.S. trade tariffs on all
imports, sending consumer prices through the roof, hurting our economy
and sparking a no-win trade war.

But if, as expected, the GOP
keeps control of Congress in November, there is no way that any of
Hillary's tax hikes would be enacted. And tax cuts, of course, would be
dead on arrival in the Oval Office. It will be four years of political
paralysis.

Ditto for Trump on tariffs. There is no way that the
GOP Congress will ever raise taxes on consumers in this or any future
economic environment.

Meantime, durable goods factory orders
plunged 4 percent in June. Jobless claims are rising. The economy is
drifting. And Putin is plotting his next conquest.

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I’m an American Patriot...part of the grassroots movement of bloggers spreading the truth about the corrupt and traitorous Obama regime and his sanctioned islamization of America. I'm also co-host with Craig Andresen of RIGHT SIDE PATRIOTS on American Political Radio. http://tunein.com/radio/American-Political-Radio-s273246/